Nowtopian

This past Friday I attended the Long Now‘s lecture series, featuring Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. He’s a very personable guy, self-deprecatingly claiming that he isn’t very smart, but that he’s really really friendly. I couldn’t tell–he might be telling the truth! But what I liked a lot about his talk was his focus on the social process underlying Wikipedia as opposed to a more predictably geeky approach which might have focused on software tools. As a person who has participated for years in participatory media projects, from Processed World to Shaping San Francisco, a lot of what Wales talked about was quite familiar to me, both in terms of the magic that comes from a collective participatory project and the inevitable problems that are in its deep nature too.

If you aren’t familiar with Wikipedia, it’s an amazing sprawling on-line encyclopedia. The Wikipedia vision is “to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.” It oddly echoes the 18th century French Encyclopedie edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, the first attempt to compile everything we know about everything in one place. One of Wikipedia’s defining features is its openness and its limited but crucial set of rules. The overriding ethic informing the contents of Wikipedia is what they call the ‘neutral point of view’.

Since I spend most of my life trying to write strongly opinionated words that inspire others to themselves share their opinions as strongly as they can, this is almost shocking. I actually don’t like a self-proclaimed ‘neutral point of view’ because it obscures so much more than it reveals. But if you’re just trying to ‘get the facts’ it fits that mission well. And for many people consulting a resource like Wikipedia, they don’t want to think the ‘facts’ they’re accessing are ‘just’ someone’s opinion. All the subjective and cultural influences embedded in the way we frame facts, knowledge, epistemology, etc. is left by the wayside.

OK. Just like reading the NY Times or any media, you have to have your own filters on full operational mode so you can decipher what you’re being told.

Anyway, there’s no disputing that the Wikipedia model is “succeeding” in interesting ways. Thousands of people are working on it, putting in incredible hours, all as volunteers. I love that about it. I also realized, as Wales was queried about the problems facing Wikipedia and he brought up the issue of scale, that this was its likely achilles heel too. The problem of depending on people who self-select as editors because they are willing to spend so much time working for free on computers is self-evident.

Continue reading The Scale of Self-management